Italy Day 2 : Florence

17th Feb 2010:
The morning bather me woke up super early today! And I managed to get ready for the day before anyone woke up :D I used the extra time to plan the trip for the day. This time, I had a map, my ipod touch (which couldn't connect to the hostel's network the night before) could connect to it today! I used evernote to jot down the details of the places we need to visit and had a good look at them on google maps and the paper map that I had :D The 30 mins of walking to the dinner place yesterday somehow gave me a comfortable feeling about the place! The other guys in the room had their bf first while I looked hungrily at them :(

We had only ordered bf at 9am! I was ready for the day at 7am! lol! Johnny got ready at about 8 plus, after i woke him up. I was Azri's and Johnny's alarm clock! I mixed up their times! hahah! For that day, we were supposed to meet Pau at the station at noon and go on to visit the more exciting places. When it was 9, the girls walked in:

hahah! The breakfast was great! So great that even Johnny who wanted to wait for everybody to come before starting gave up on waiting!

We first went to this garden behind the street we were staying in. It was pretty beautiful! And the day was great, with the sun out :D I regretted wearing my thermals! I was wearing 4 layers! I removed my sweater to stop myself from perspiring.

The 2 guys with DSLRs were happy with the weather. After taking a couple of pics a the park, we went over to a piazza (sth like a square). This is when my camera ran out of battery and I realised that the other battery was still in the charger in the hostel! No choice but to go back and take it :( To my happiness, Johnny joined me too! He needed to use the hostel toilet though! hahah, I used the time to take out my thermals and sweater, I decided to just go with the 2 layers for that day. Hopefully, the night wouldn't be too cold! The 2 of us were supposed to meet the rest at the station at about 12, so we decided to take a different route there:

And we ended up at this place where there was a granny and a kid feeding several birds! I decided to join them too :D Johnny has nice pics of it! I see a potential display pic here!

And after passing be a big big fountain,

we ended up at a big big big fort:

After taking several pics there, we went over to the tunnel near the station and to the station. Johnny managed to take some pro shots with my tripod!
After waiting for abt 20 mins, we found the rest and managed to spot Pau too! We first went down to the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, where I took this panaroma video:

We then walked over to the famous Duomo!

Firstly, there was this cathedral near it that we could enter :D

And we could see the inside of the duomo for free!

And I took a panaroma video inside the Duomo cathedral:

here

Only Johnny, Pau and I went in since the others had gone in ald. Kai hee had gotten a Gelato when we were outside! Anyway, we all got back together to climb the duomo to the top, i think it was 264 steps, and it costed us 8 euros!
And this was the panaromic video that I took on the way to the top:

And the view of Florence from the top was amazing since the duomo was one of the tallest buildings there. Here's a super-panaromic view of the Florence from the top of the Duomo

And we came back down after spending about 30 mins up there to make full use of our $$.

After that, my plan was to walk over to the Arno river, boboli gardens on the other side and turn back. We passed this Gelato shop. There are a lot of this kinda shops in florence. a cup usually costs 2,50 euros.

On the way, the others spotted this piazza that I had missed on the map! I think it was the intependente piazza or sth.. It was great! haha, We saw more statues of naked men, with a copy of the Michelangelo's David!

And we found that we could go into one of the buildings there :D and So, we did and took some pics!

And the others except JH and Saba finally gave in and bought a Gelato! The both of them managed to find a better shop along the way :( I should have waited!

And finally, we reached the Arno river:

And by this time, the weather was turning bad.. It started raining!

Nevertheless, we crossed the river and went over to the other side. I was glad that we didn't get to the boboli gardens earlier cos we can save it for the next day! There was this harry potter-like shop on the way:

We dropped by a supermarket along the way and after posing for a photo along the slopes of the boboli gardens, we decided to call it a day and get dinner. We came across this cheap place but it was closed ald :( The lady then suggested us another place which was also closed. So, we decided to cross the river, go back to hostel and look for a nice place to eat at along the way. And we took a group photo along the river with my tripod!

And the view of the river was awesome during the night:

And just we walked on at about 500m from the river, I realised I had left my bag at the river, near my tripod!! hahah, It had my passport, credit cards, ipod touch and more stuff in it! I ran back and managed to get it back though, as the shopkeeper near the place where we took photo had safe-kept it for me :D And walking on, we managed to find a place to eat it! The place had this structure filled with bottle corks:

And here is my dinner for the day! I skipped lunch as I had a super heavy breakfast!

And this is me, dressed like fong chi:

And this is me dressed like Kai Hee:

This dress was super tight! couldn't bring the buttons together :P

Phew! That's all for today! Me, the morning bather was one of the first to go to bed as usual :D 1116 words!

Italy Day 1-Eindhoven to Pisa to Florence

I don't remember what time I woke up but I managed to get down to the meeting place at the meeting time. I wanted to take my blue backpack but it was too big to fit into ryanair's restrictions :( I had to bring my black bag instead. I brought my reversible pants and a few tees for the trip! And I met up with the others behind my place and I got my first state of the GPS capabilities of a jailbroken iphone! it was cool! And Jiang Heng's Nokia GPS was superb too! I really cold use one of those things! but now, I had to stick to maps and stuff :(

Once we reached the bus interchange at central station, we waited for the bus as I started to munch on my bread. I had milk at home ald. We were supposed to meet Kai Hee and Azri at the interchage, but they were no where to be seen till the first bus to the airport we planned to take was about to leave. We decided to take it anyway :P

And the bus driver let us stamp the thing ourselves! hahha! Johnny, sharing tic with JH stamped 8 slots, as he should. the rest of us stamped less than that, with me travelling at the cheapest rate, at just 2 stamps! yay!
Later, we found out that those 2 managed to take a bus that left after ours :D After getting to the airport, we waited for KH and Azri:

And to my surprise, I wasn't the one who paid the least for my bus ride anymore! Those 2 had travelled for FREE since the machine was spoiled! oh man.. I should have joined them! argh! hahah! anyway, we had to wait till 8am for the flight gate to open. I was really thirsty and I had to throw away my water bottle at security. So, I bought a bottle for S$3 before boarding:( Later, I discovered that I had bought 'sparkling water' and it tasted really bad!

Look! a man dressed in costume boarded the plane too! hahah!

And we said ta-ta to Eindhoven Airport!

Along the way, I managed to take a shot of the swiss alps as we flew over them:

And as expected by the weather forecast, it was drizzling as we landed in pisa! From the airport, we walked to the train station with the aid of the 2 GPS people among us. It was about 1.5 km away!

And on our way to the LEANING TOWER, we passed by a river!

I was amazed at how clean the river was! It didn't smell at all! Maybe it's because it's winter. And it was a comfortable 10 degrees there! And as we walked on and on, the leaning tower emerged from the buildings!

After taking a few pics of it, we went to walk around the place to explore. We found this souvenir shop and a row of souvenir shops outside! Great place to buy back stuff for my frens back in s'pore! hahah, I'm not gonna say what i bought here, it's supposed to be a surprise!
And it costs 15 euros to go up! We decided that It wasn't really worth it and took photos around the place instead. and the birds there came really close to me! look, i took this!!

more pics of the place on the facebook album!
After Azri couldn't take his hunger anymore, we went over to find a pizza place. They were all over the place! hahah, we went into this Restorante Bar Europeo! I liked the place's interior:

As 2 of us ordered water, the waitress brought water n this container that looked like those used in labs to hold chemicals! hahah! here is Fong Chi pouring some Hydrogen peroxide on a glass!

And we were given complimentary bread with our meal. It was terrible! the worst non-stale bread i've ever tasted! it was super hard and chewy. Everyone of us had a taste of it though :P
And finally, my Vegetariana pizza come along!

Yes, to those of you who are wondering, I ate the WHOLE pizza! I was super full at the end of it! I'm glad we took a walk around to burn off some of the calories. We went over to a museum, then just walked along the river... and there was this vending machine for cigarettes that had a slot for ppl to insert their identity cards:

A fancy shot of Azri and Kai hee along one of the passage ways:

you can see that it's in black and white. why? cos the weather wasn't nice for color pics! Azri came up with this idea and i noted that his pics were awesome and so I started taking in B & W too!
Another thing worth noticing in Pisa is this awesome church. If you walk from the airport/train station to the leaning tower, it's difficult to miss it:

As there was nothing much to see in Pisa, we hoped onto a train and made our way to florence! haha! JH, KH and me were at the counter trying to sound italian in our english when buying the train tics! We were so bored along the way that we started guessing the number of stops left and counting them! We counted to 15! Johnny was right :D
Here is KH trying to form the italian flag with her clothes:green sweater, white pants, red jacket!

And walking to the hostel (Danny's house) was terrible! It was raining when we got to Florence! We went over to a supermarket nearby to buy water bottles for ourselves and started out. I had seen the map before but didn't save it/print it out :( argh, i was so dumb! Jiang Heng's nokia GPS was really good in giving directions! We finally managed to reach the place:

And I made a new friend, Melissa! Say hi to her, everyone:

And the hostel owner was really nice to us: He gave us a map of the nice places to visit in Florence, marked them out, made us an extra key and we were gonna have breakfast for 2 euros the next morning! But we needed to settle our dinner for that day. So, I went over to him to ask for a good place to eat. After getting the directions, we started walking to that place. We saw a lot of nice buildings along the way but it was too dark to take any pics. We reached the place after about 30 minutes of walking. And I had this soup with pasta and beans. Try it if you want something other than pizza/pasta! It tasted great:

And then, we walked allll the way back! Some of us went to bathe while I went to bed-I'm a morning bather! wow! Lots of stuff on this day.. this post is 1142 words long!

Day 19-Setting off to Italy!

15th Feb 2010
I just realised that my post-dates don't coincide with the dates that I'm writing about, since I usually write about a day several day after it happened. I'll go fix it when i'm free-er. I'm kinda busy for this week :(

Alrights.. This day.. I spent this day caching up on my blogging! Yup! Till I fix the dates problem, you can see quite a lot of posts written on Feb 15th! hahah! Maybe i shouldn't fix the problem! Yea, I think it's better to just leave it like that. I'll put the dates of the 'day' that i'm writing about to solve the prob. In the evening, I went over to Azri's place to discuss the plans for Florence part of the trip to Italy. I finished uploading the pics to fb at their home too, as they were having their lunch! In the evening, Kai hee went to get her strippen kaart for 7.60 euros. And when she returned, she couldn't find it! poor thing! I think she dropped it when trying to put it into her bag or sth.. I did a through search of her jacket and bag-couldn't find it :( And Azri and Jiang Heng needed the Kaart too! So, I went down to the central station, but the place was closed ald :( I came back home to pack and managed to sleep at 10pm! yippee! Have to wake up early next morning, since the flight is at 8am!

Day 18-The White Valentine's day

This day.. I wanted to go around to explore Eindhoven but I wasn't sure of really where to go. And in the morning, I was trying to video convo with my mom but some error kept coming up :( So, I talked on the phone for abt 30 mins with her! It was quite cheap I think... After that, I tried to troubleshoot the problem but couldn't.. I think it was some firewall thingy :( But i gave up at about 11am and went to make myself some lunch. As I was munching on my lunch, I was googling frantically on where to go for the day. A few ideas that ruled my head were: These are also instructions for those living in Eindhoven to explore the region!
1. Goto to Veldoven, a village nearby (steenstraat -> Kastenjelaan -> Cedarlaan -> Noord-Brabant (go past the roundabout) -> Heerbaan (go past the round-about) -> arrived!
2. Goto Geldrop, another village even nearer!: follow the road called Eindhovensweg which may change its name to Geldropsweg along the way...
3. Goto see a water mill: Eisenhowerlaan -> goup wolvendijk ->opwettenseweg (should be somehere there...)
4. Continue from no .3 to Helmond! a city near Eindhoven: Follow N270 to Helmond! You can't go on the expressway, but the map shows that there is a road running parellel to it, leading to Helmond.
5. To see a windmill!: go up Boschijkt street till you pass by this street called Anthony Fokkerweg! And look to your right! The windmill should be there, along Boschijkt street itself! And do go in and explore the forest on the left that you would have passed by.

Before I set off, I had to clear the rubbish! The rubbish-throwing place was 2 streets away from my place:

And every resident is given a card to tap onto the green part! The thing opens up upon tapping:

And after that, I cleared up the snow on my bike and got ready to go!

And as I travelled up Bosdijk street, I came to this foresty place which I felt like going into! And since the gate was open, why not? And it was snowing that day. I wouldn't say heavily, but yea.. it was cold.

What I was wearing: A set of thermals, a long-sleeve polo tee, a double layered ski-pants, a woolen sweater, the big big down jacket, ski gloves, scarf, the tuslan hat and 2 layers of winter socks to protect my feet! And I saw some buffaloes alongs the way!

I discovered where my electricity comes from (note the power station behind):

And finallyy.. I saw the windmill that I had been looking for!! yippeee!

And there seemed to be a frozen lake nearby, with ducks sitting on top:

And since there was still time till sunset, I went to explore more around the region! I went out of eindhoven, while my camera was still in Eindhoven:

And I went away from the Boschijkt street into this
foresty area:

And initially, my feet and hands began feeling cold. But after I began venturing into the forest they seemed to magically warm up again as I walked around a while! And I was feeling really cozy in all my layers and accessories! But it was soon time to leave...

And I stood on a frozen canal!! For the first time! I heared some cracks as I walked back to take my camera.. so, yea, I'm pretty sure there is water underneath!

And I found those National cycling tracks too!

And I had a surprise as I followed one of the tracks that was supposed to lead back to Eindhoven, but It'll be a spoiler to those NUS exchange students staying with me... That's it for the White Valentine's day :D Happy V-day, everyone!